Like most people, I sometimes ask myself what might have been: if only I had decided differently, had I only acted otherwise. Most of these thoughts concern my personal life, but I also look back on a national question: what would the country look like had I insisted on advancing an idea I had about fifteen years ago, when I was a young, energetic retiree. Forgive the hubris, but had I persevered, might things look different today?

I summarized the idea in a document I called Ben Zakkai. It occurred to me after a women’s Torah class taught by a female scholar; she and her students are the product of a quiet revolution within Orthodox Judaism, which enables and even encourages women to delve into the Jewish sources.

I wrote: “We discussed Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who, around the time of the destruction of the Temple, asked the Romans for Yavneh and its sages. For the first time I heard that Rabbi Akiva had criticized him for giving up Jerusalem. Neither the teacher nor any of the students thought to add that even if Akiva was right when he said it, from a historical perspective it is clear that he was wrong. Had Yohanan thought as Akiva did, there would have been no Judaism left, no one would be talking about the issue today.”........

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