Book review: Is Alternative Healing Kosher? |
In Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945–2025, Dr. Lawrence Grossman has written a fantastic book that looks at the development of modern orthodoxy in the USA. He writes that many practices in the modern Orthodox world that were perfectly acceptable then are now verboten. From the consumption of non-glatt meat, women not covering their hair, to mixed dancing and more, are things of the past in today’s modern orthodoxy.
Professor Haym Soloveitchik’s 1994 essay Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Modern Orthodoxy brilliantly articulates the shift in practice from a mimetic tradition (learned by example) to a stricter, text-based observance. Soloveitchik wrote that the Holocaust broke familial transmission and forced people to rely on detailed halakhic texts for guidance, leading to increased ritual stringency.
Between what Grossman and Soloveitchik wrote, it’s pretty shocking to find that swaths of ultra-orthodox Jews engage in idolatrous practices, in the name of new age practice and alternative medicine therapies.
“You shall live by them,” as written in Vayikra 18:5, is a central tenet in Judaism. One of the things one must forfeit one’s life rather than live by is idolatry. The tragic era of the Crusades is filled with incidents where thousands of Jews had to do just that.
With the move to the right and it being axiomatic that one has to forfeit their life rather than engage in idolatry, it’s quite shocking to read magazines from the most right-wing communities that have advertisements for techniques and classes which, at worst, are actual idolatry, and at best, at least a question of it. Which, in the current era, would automatically forbid such practices. This includes alternative medicine practices, new age therapies, and the like, that at best may be nothing more than a placebo, and at worst, actual idolatry.
In 2017, Rabbi Rephoel Szmerla wrote Alternative Medicine in Halachah. I wrote my objections to the book, The Not-So-Orthodox Embrace of the New Age Movement, for The Lehrhaus.