Teaching Complexity at a Conference of Certainty |
I was not at the 2026 Smol Emuni conference. But I watched the recording from Israel. And I have not stopped thinking about what I saw.
I should tell you who Rabbi Saul Berman is, though if you studied at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University at any point in the last five decades, you probably already know. He was my teacher. I took as many courses from him as possible during my four-year tenure at Stern. In 1971, he became chair of the Judaic Studies department at Stern and built it into a serious undergraduate program. He did it deliberately because he believed women deserved Torah at the highest level. Not Torah lite. Not survey courses. The full weight of the tradition, and the intellectual tools to engage it independently.
He used to tell his students, “If you do not use a right, you will lose it.” It was not a reassurance. It was a charge.
When he opened the Beit Midrash at Stern to women in 1976, Rav Soloveitchik came to speak. A student asked how she should respond to people who challenged her right to learn Gemara. The Rav’s answer, as Rabbi Berman later recounted it, was simple: “Do not answer him. Tell him to talk to me.”
That is the tradition Rabbi Berman comes from and helped build.
He also spent Purim 1965 in a Selma jail, arrested during the voter registration marches. An Orthodox rabbi, arm in arm with civil rights activists. He helped lead the Soviet Jewry movement before it was fashionable. In 1997, he founded Edah, devoted to what he described as a Modern Orthodoxy passionately committed to Torah and mitzvot, deeply connected to the entire Jewish people, open to the richness of secular knowledge, dedicated to expanding opportunities for women in Torah, tefillah, and community leadership, and grounded in the belief that every human being carries the image of God.
He wrote that the Modern Orthodox experiment begins with the conviction that Orthodoxy can preserve its integrity and passion, and even be enriched, by its encounter with modernity, and that this encounter allows Orthodoxy to offer the broader world a clearer vision of the grandeur of Torah.
This is the man who was booed at a Jewish conference. And then publicly rebuked from the stage.
Here is what happened.
Rabbi Berman was invited to speak at the afternoon plenary of the 2026 Smol Emuni US conference. He delivered a serious, substantive address. He pushed back on an earlier panel that he felt left no room for a Jewish voice about Israel alongside the Palestinian voice. He cited Rav Soloveitchik. He referenced his arrest in Selma as an example of standing with the marginalized while........