waiting for the messiah? 531
and by the difficulty of forcing a recalcitrant husband by social pressure
alone to give his wife a bill of divorce, leaving her a ‘chained woman’
unable to remarry within the orthodox community. The state of limbo in
which such women are left is widely recognized as unjust, but solutions
have proved hard to find within orthodox halakhic jurisprudence.^5
Despite the kaleidoscopic variety we have seen within Judaism at all
periods in its history, and the occasional bitterness of disputes over such
practical issues and (more rarely) over dogma, toleration, albeit often
grudging, has emerged as a consistent thread throughout this history.
While the Second Temple stood, Jews of different philosophical schools
and sects attended the Temple services together, and served as priests,
despite intense disagreement about how the rituals should be carried
out and about such basic issues of theological doctrine as life after
death. Rabbinic literature is replete with stories of rabbis who agreed to
disagree. Acceptance of local custom emerged early as a principle in
rabbinic thought, and when whole communities were transplanted the
right of each congregation to maintain its separate identity was univer-
sally recognized. At times, the intervention of secular states intent on
imposition of uniformity imposed forbearance from above, but in the
multicultural societies in which contemporary Jews now find them-
selves in Europe and (especially) North America, Jews themselves have
sometimes welcomed variety as desirable in itself. The many voices
within Judaism are seen by the orthodox theologian David Hartman, a
passionate advocate of pluralism who came from New York but was an
influential voice in modern orthodox circles in Jerusalem from the
1970s to his death in 2013, as a ‘heart of many rooms’.^6
The unpredictability of the changes within Judaism as a result of the
Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel during the twentieth
century urges caution in predictions about the twenty- first. There are
plausible grounds to believe both that adherence to the religion will
diminish and that it will grow. A decline in the authority of local reli-
gious leaders outside ultra- religious circles has been accompanied, in
the age of the internet, by two competing trends. On the one hand, an
authoritative view can now be obtained almost instantaneously on
almost any topic from rabbinic teachers with access to exceptional
halakhic knowledge stored in databases of rabbinic responsa. On the
other hand, fora of like- minded Jews have begun to forge new forms of
Judaism by cooperation in the democratic space of the worldwide web.
Traditional orthodox Judaism in the diaspora, when it is based only on
inherited habits and unencumbered either by personal piety or by