I want to disagree significantly with this thread, written by a dear former student. I hope that I can manage to convey disagreement on substance without rancor or personal animus. (Which I haven't always managed to pull off, as a beloved former student on here can attest.) https://twitter.com/Leezard3/status/1247691033636470784

I don't have to re-establish my bona fides as an Orthodox feminist, as a sometimes-critic of the Orthodox rabbinic establishment, as someone who sees the development of halakha as historically embedded and done by human beings.

I once wrote something about that and narrowly dodged being put in cherem, but that's a story for another time.

But central to the enterprise of Orthodox Judaism as a belief system is that there is a commanding God who tells us to do stuff, and not to do other stuff. Whether we want to, whether it's hard. Whether it's really hard.

(Setting aside for the moment the question of what percentage of Orthodox Jews aren't bought into that ideology, but are Orthodox because of connection to community or the Jewish people.)

I don't think American Modern Orthodoxy has built the "even if it's really hard" muscle. Partially that's because we have been blessed by wealth and success for the past few decades, and have faced fewer of those very hard circumstances that our ancestors knew too well.

But I think it's deeper than that. At the core of the value proposition of American Modern Orthodox is that you can have it all. The beauty of a Torah life and the wonders of the modern university. Your profession and Shabbat observance.

A Jewish education for your kids and all the college-admissions-track bells and whistles. (I once, in an article, tried to call that "Horace Mann plus a bren for Yiddishkeit." I think they thought too many people wouldn't know what a bren was, so it became geshmak.)

In the world in which I grew up, the stories told were of the kid who faced conflict between observance and the big game or the big competition, and so forfeited the game.

In the Modern Orthodox world, the stories we tell are of how they got the game moved, so they could both compete and keep Shabbos. The heroism stories are stories of having it all, not of sacrificing for one's observance.

I have discovered (the hard way) that sacrifice is a triggering word for many in the community. For good reason: they suspect that when sacrifice is called for, women and LGBTQ people are going to be the ones called to sacrifice of themselves for God.

But in the haredi world, there's much more of an ethos of a lot of people being called on to give up a lot for God. And it is certainly not just women or LGBTQ folk.

(Please do not tell me what you hate about the haredi world. I'm sure you do. Not the point right now.)

We in the Modern Orthodox world have emphasized synthesis and Grand Conversation and doing this and that and taking this with you when you do that in a way that I think gets vulgarized as you can have it all.

And then when you can't--when you run smack dab into de'oraita prohibitions that we can't work around--we don't know what to do. This isn't what we were promised.

Where there's a rabbinic will, isn't there a halakhic way?

Again, I don't disagree with you about anything. We could view issues that affect women as matters of more communal urgency. We could apply more halakhic creativity to finding some solutions to some problems. We could do more than (shruggy emoticon.)

But at the end of the day, I don't think we can make everything work the way we would want it to. I don't think the rabbanim can.

(My haredi sister works in an NYC public school. When this started, her Catholic co-worker said to her, "You can't do Passover this year like this! The rabbis are going to have to do something!" She didn't mean kitniyot--she meant permitting chametz on Pesach. Sorry, no can do.)

(And again, please don't tell me about Bergen-Belsen. Yes, in Bergen-Belsen you can eat chametz on Pesach. We are not there. Or close. Or in the same solar system. Thank God.)

The lay cynicism of "the rabbis just aren't doing this because they don't want to enough" feeds the rabbinic cynicism of "we can't say that something is permissible because the masses will decide that everything is permissible."

My heart goes out to those couples trying to conceive, to those people for whom extended niddah (if that's what this entails--I am not paskening) is a great hardship.

Here's the thing: that's true of taharat hamishpacha, not just during COVID. We keep it because it's a mitzvah, not because it's a walk in the park.

(Side note: I desperately wish we could do away with teaching about taharat hamishpacha as a sex-life-enhancer. It might work that way for some people, it certainly doesn't work that way for others, it's not why we do it,

and it feeds back into the having-it-all way of thinking about our Modern Orthodox lives that doesn't prepare us for when it's hard. When you're trying to conceive. When you're post miscarriage/stillbirth and a niddah for a long time. Just when.

There's much more to say here about trying to get people to commit through the hard in a world of radical choice, but that's a whole other conversation, and it's Erev Pesach.

But our ancestors kept Torah and mitzvot through far worse circumstances than we are being asked to. As bad as it is--and recognizing, always, that it is much worse for others--as an historian, I find something powerfully moving about being able, in some small way, to join them.