Reply To: Demographics of Orthodox Jewry

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#959468
rebdoniel
Member

The whole taxonomy is off. There are plenty of people who carve out their own paths, and who affiliate and borrow from with different sectors and communities and approaches.

I know lots of people who are clean-shaven, own a television, daven Nusah Sefard, and wear a bekeshe on shabbat (I even own a bekeshe that I’d wear on shabbos in the past), and others who combine elements of Modern Orthodoxy and Open Orthodoxy with a classic Sephardic approach and even elements of German Neo-Orthodoxy (I’d definitely fall into that camp, and a friend from Silver Spring would, as well).

I happen to work as a hazzan in a shul where they have a potted plant mehitza that is a little more than 10 tefahim high. This was a synagogue that was staunchly non-egalitarian Conservadox with a YU-trained rabbi for many years. Upon his retirement, it was told to me that the shul board voted to instate separate seating, a bima/shulhan facing the proper direction, and to eliminate the microphone. The shul has one YU-trained rabbi and another rabbi with the semikha of R’ David Weiss HaLivni. The mehitza is not ideal, but its presence at least makes the shul a viable option for halakhic Jews to visit and daven in. Without this arrangement, I would not have accepted a position there.

YCT did have a mehitza-only policy, but I do know that one of their graduates is now the rabbi of a synagogue in Overland Park, Kansas where they have no mehitza (and where the UTJ rabbi of the shul I work at once completed an internship). I don’t perceive a tayna “against” the mehitza among the progressive Orthodox, but I do feel that those in this camp are intellectually honest on the topic, as indicated by my many postings on the issue.