counter- reform 489
Reform in the early nineteenth century, and the growing awareness of
Jews that they had other religious options than to obey their communal
rabbi, most orthodox leaders acceded, however reluctantly, to what was
in effect a double standard. It was common already in Hirsch’s commu-
nity in Hamburg for members of the congregation to do business on the
Sabbath. For much of the twentieth century some orthodox Jews insisted
on men and women sitting together for prayer in the synagogue despite
the opposition of their rabbis, for whom the position, height and nature
of the dividing barrier between male and female worshippers sometimes
became a totemic issue on which the rabbis had to compromise: in the
1950s, rabbinic graduates of Yeshiva University were encouraged to take
up a pulpit with congregations with mixed seating but were expected to
ensure a separation within five years of their appointment – not always
successfully. In some orthodox synagogues, where the car park will be
closed for the Sabbath, the congregation will park their cars in adjoining
streets and the rabbi will avoid mentioning the subject in his sermon, on
the grounds that it is better to have sinners within the community, where
they can still be encouraged (if only by example) to adopt a more reli-
gious lifestyle, than to force them out to a different denomination. The
policy has, at least until recently, been conspicuously successful in Anglo-
Jewry. The United Synagogue, embracing many of the orthodox
synagogues in London and some in the provinces under the authority of
the British chief rabbi, and established by act of parliament in 1870,
claims within its membership about half of English Jews, many of whom
observe the halakhah in a fairly relaxed fashion. This does not necessarily
imply ignorance on their part – although, following the lead of Maimon-
ides in relation to Karaites, the rabbinic justification for tolerating laxity
is that these Jews are like ‘infants who have been captured’ and thus not
responsible for their inability to tread the right path – but rather that
contemporary orthodox Jews in the diaspora increasingly see their reli-
gion as a way of life derived from a set of textual regulations rather than
a way of life imitated from generation to generation.^14
The position of modern orthodox Jews in Israel is rather different,
since living within a majority Jewish society has permitted, at least for
some, considerable independence of theological enquiry. So, for instance,
the scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who spent his professional life as a
professor of chemistry and neurophysiology in the Hebrew University,
forged a distinctive conception of Judaism as a theocentric religion
which requires believers to serve God simply for the sake of serving him
and not for any reward or metaphysical purpose. Arguing that scientific