Movements in modern Judaism that affirm the divine revelation and eternal authority of the Torah, oral and written. It regards the laws of the Torah as God’s imperatives and insists on complete obedience to those laws, as interpreted by the great Rabbinic sages. The Torah records things that really happened, words that God articulated to the named prophets, the conditions that God has set forth to make Israel a suitable abode for his presence on earth.
While Orthodoxy is diverse and divided, it may be divided into two main divisions, integrationist and self-segregationist. The former favors the integration of the Jews into the national life of the countries of their birth and regards ZIONISM as integral to Judaism. The latter advocates the social and cultural segregation of holy Israel from other people in the countries where they live, including the state of Israel, and within the self-segregationist camp are communities of Orthodox Judaism that do not regard Zionism as integral to Judaism or that even reject Zionism and the state of Israel altogether. Indicators such as clothing, language, above all, education differentiate integrationist from segregationist Judaisms. Integrationist, or “modern-Orthodox” Jews keep and study the law of the Torah but include in the curriculum subjects outside of the sciences of the Torah. Self-segregationist Orthodox Jews study only the sacred sciences, represented by the literature of the Torah.
Integrationist-Orthodox Judaism originated among Jews who rejected Reform and made a self-conscious decision to remain within the way of life and worldview that they had known and cherished all their lives. They framed the issues in terms of change and history. The Reformers held that Judaism could change and that Judaism was a product of history. The Orthodox opponents denied that Judaism could change and insisted that Judaism, derived from God’s will at Sinai, was eternal and supernatural, not historical and man-made. Integrationist-Orthodox Judaism dealt with the same urgent questions as did REFORM JUDAISM, questions raised by political emancipation, but it gave different answers to them. As a result, Integrationist-Orthodoxy formulated a mode of Jewish life that, like Reform, encouraged participation in and enjoyment of the benefits of the modern world. Jews may wear clothing that non-Jews wear, may live within a common economy with non-Jews, and may, in diverse ways, take up a life not readily distinguished from the lives lived by people in general. But even as it permitted this entry into the cultures of the countries in which Jews lived, Integrationist-Orthodoxy insisted, unlike the Reformers, that other equally important aspects of life—diet, the calendar of holy days, and sacred convocations, the content and language of prayer—remain in the category of the sacred and could not be dismissed or changed. See HIRSCH, SAMSON RAPHAEL.
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