Dorff, who received a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy from Colum­bia with a dis­ser­ta­tion on moral the­o­ry, believes that if a law is immoral based on our under­stand­ing, then it can and should be changed. The abil­i­ty to change a law is pred­i­cat­ed on the premise that the Torah is not the word of God. If the Doc­u­men­tary Hypoth­e­sis (key word is hypoth­e­sis) is accept­ed and the Torah was man-made then this log­ic holds: If man wrote it, man can change it. Dorff claims there is due regard for the weight of tra­di­tion when mak­ing changes and that com­mu­nal con­cur­rence should help guard against pre­cip­i­tous changes. Unfor­tu­nate­ly this has not always been the case. His posi­tion on homo­sex­u­al­i­ty almost split the move­ment. He places much faith in man’s under­stand­ing of what is moral, yet still main­tains that Jew­ish tra­di­tion embod­ies a rev­e­la­tion of divine truth and will. This seems very contradictory. 

This book will be judged by those who are empow­ered to act on behalf of the Con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. If they accept Dorff ​’s the­sis then cer­tain­ly more and rad­i­cal changes are on the way. ​“The trick…” as Dorff states ​“is strik­ing a bal­ance between assim­i­lat­ing to the out­side envi­ron­ment or cul­ture and assert­ing one’s own dis­tinc­tive­ness.” Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing this del­i­cate bal­ance is the man­ner in which Dorff selects rab­binic teach­ings upon which to base his inno­va­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions. Rab­bis in every gen­er­a­tion looked for prece­dents. It is high­ly unlike­ly how­ev­er that the rab­bis whose sources are cit­ed in some of these respon­sa would rec­og­nize the Judaism their deci­sions are pur­port­ed to sup­port, Dorff ​’s demur­ral notwithstanding.

This book is a seri­ous attempt by a seri­ous schol­ar to address con­tem­po­rary issues fac­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive Jews. He devel­ops a detailed case based on in-depth analo­gies of organ­ism and covenant. He strives to under­stand the nature and func­tion­ing of Jew­ish law in a con­tem­po­rary set­ting. ​“The strength of my analy­sis will depend on the extent to which what I sug­gest accu­rate­ly reflects the real­i­ties of Jew­ish law in the past and present.” For this review­er, this book does not meet that stan­dard. Had there been more hug­ging of the tra­di­tion instead of wrestling with it, perhaps.