Morethodoxy: Exploring the Breadth, Depth and Passion of Orthodox Judaism

Rav Moshe Feinstein was never known as a feminist. But he both understood and accepted feminism’s core moral claim.

In a remarkable 1976 responsum he wrote bluntly about what he perceived to be the effort to extend the women’s liberation movement from the political and social spheres into the religious. He opened by reasserting the fact that women are exempt from a particular well-known set of mitzvot, and that this exemption is rooted both in Divine wisdom, and in the practical wisdom of the rabbis, who deemed it unrealistic and unfair to expect that these mitzvot be observed by those who bear primary responsibility for the raising of children and the daily running of the household. Rav Moshe branded any effort to change this halachik exemption as being both futile and rebellious, even going so far as to say that were a woman to perform a mitzva from which she is exempt not out of religious desire rather in the effort to undermine the exemption, that this would not constitute a mitzva act at all.

But Rav Moshe didn’t end there. He concluded the responsum with a lengthy paragraph in which he demonstrated that he accepted the core of feminism’s moral claim, regarding it as consistent with classical Jewish teaching.

“… [the exemption] is not a result of the fact that women possess a lower spiritual rank than men. For with regard to holiness, they are equal…And with regard to the obligation to honor a spouse, we find that the obligation applies from husband to wife, and from wife to husband without any distinction… There is no degradation of women’s honor [in the tradition]…”

Equal holiness, worth, dignity, and humanity. This is the essence of the feminist moral claim.

In the lead article of the Summer 2002 issue of Tradition, Orthodox attorney Marc Stern   challenged the mainstream Orthodox community over its habitual denunciations of feminism. First, on the grounds of intellectual dishonesty, as so much of the community has enthusiastically embraced many of feminism’s outcomes, including  high educational standards for girls, hands-on involvement of fathers in raising their children, the expectation of equal pay for equal work, and the zero tolerance for sexual harassment in the workplace. He notes that none of his readers would want to see these developments rolled back.  And then second, on the grounds that the resistance of feminism has exacted a religious price. In Stern’s words,

“In all too many communities shiurim for women are infantile outpourings of primitive and unreflective emotion, as if women were incapable of understanding anything more complex. Talented women have been lost to the Orthodox community [as a result]. The fight for equality has not yet been won, even within the realms of what is without question halachikly acceptable. How many shul have been built in the last generation that reflect a concern for… the ability of women to feel as if they are participants in the davening?”

Religious costs are indeed incurred through resisting feminism’s fundamental claim.  To the costs  Stern mentioned we also add the fact that many Orthodox rabbis still refuse to utilize the halachik pre-nuptial agreement intended to save women from becoming agunot, that women who do become agunot sometimes receive shoddy treatment at the hands of Dayanim and the members of their own  communities. And the reality that in many day schools serving the mainstream Orthodox community boys and girls still do not enjoy the same Jewish studies curriculum. The rejection of feminism’s central claim comes at a religious cost.

The extreme manifestation of this of course is the zealous suppression of women in the public sphere that has become mainstream Haredi religious behavior. Their well-known policies of seating women in the back of the bus, eliminating women’s pictures from public view, and requiring that women not appear in public ceremonies even to accept their own governmental awards, do not stem from halachik analysis, rather from precisely the kind of repressive chauvinism that the feminist movement aimed to root out.  The halachik analysis had already been done, again by Rav Moshe, who years ago had addressed a question posed by a man who feared taking the subway to work, where the crowded conditions invariably brought about physical contact with female commuters. Rav Moshe ruled that,  

“There is no prohibition to come into contact with [women under these circumstances] since it is not done in an affectionate manner. Similarly there is no prohibition to sit next to a woman when there is no other place available. And if a particular man knows that this will bring about lustful thoughts … he needs to fight against these thoughts by distracting himself and thinking about words of Torah.”

What sort of mindset simply dismisses this kind of straightforward halachik thinking in favor of making women disappear? One that stems directly from the rejection of the basic moral claim that women possess the same humanity, dignity and stature as men, and that they are not simply objects that populate a male world. And what a price has been paid for this rejection.  A disfigurement of Torah observance, and an international desecration of God’s name.

There will always be morally anchored movements and ideas that will emerge from outside our immediate four cubits. And as a religious communities, we will do much better by explicitly taking them in rather than by rejecting them. Taking them in doesn’t and shouldn’t mean surrendering all other religious values with which they may come into conflict. It means admitting them into the constellation of religious values that together determine normative religious behavior. The other important ideas out there now are democracy, and human egalitarianism – the recognition that all people of all types possess equal human dignity and worth. And these two are also facing resistance or rejection in various Orthodox quarters, with the costs already expressing themselves. Now, more than ever, we need to stand up unapologetically, and affirm with urgency the religious value of morally compelling ideas. The reward will be great.

It is obviously too early to know for sure, but it is plausible that we are witnessing the slow-motion unraveling of Haredi Judaism. Between periodic money-laundering and sexual abuse scandals in US Haredi communities and the militant intolerance of others on display today in Israel – with no meaningful internal calls for soul-searching – the signs of a religious community in deep spiritual distress abound. This seeming unraveling represents a profound tragedy for the Jewish world and for Torah, and it places a critical burden on the shoulders of the modern Orthodox community. 

It is a tragedy because the Haredi community has for many decades been an inspiration for Jews from all walks of Jewish life. We have all heard and been moved by the stories of extraordinary chesed (kindness) and self-sacrifice, piety and God-fearing-ness that are commonplace in the Haredi community. There can be no question that the profound appreciation Torah study that has sprouted day schools, yeshivot and Kollels all over the Jewish landscape is in large measure the result of Haredi dedication to this sacred activity. And yes, the importance of personal and sexual modesty has been upheld and taught to us by the Haredi community. Despite their philosophical or practical differences with Haredim, Jews of all kinds have been motivated, inspired and moved by the Haredi commitment to core Jewish religious values. 

These days are likely dwindling however, as the Haredi community is, and projects the image of being, something much less wholesome. At this juncture, how many non-Haredi Jewish teenagers, to choose the relevant demographic, are associating Haredi Judaism with piety and fear of God? What associations, tragically, are the ones that the term “Haredi” is now most likely to elicit? The spiritual unraveling of the Haredi community will create a vacuum of inspiration and religious role-modeling of enormous and frightening proportion. 

Whether we are prepared for it or not, the modern Orthodox community (in all its many shades and forms), bears the obligation to step up and fill this void. We can no longer be content to carve out our own religious lives, and bear responsibility only for our own families and communities. We need to pick up the fallen torch, and be the models of piety, Torah study, and self-sacrifice that Jews everywhere need to see, admire, and be inspired by. This shouldn’t be a stretch for us. As Orthodox Jews, we are already committed to all of these values. And we have the additional strengths of also being committed to the ways of peace and mutual-respect, to positive engagement with the world around us, and to seeing the good in modern society. Now more than ever, we need to be true to our Modern orthodox values, as the mantle of broader Jewish inspiration is falling to us.

This post originally appeared in August of 2009, but has become only more urgent since then. At the time I wrote it as “ a prayer for the full and speedy recovery of Margalit bat Miriam, who was struck and thrown from her wheelchair by a driver who did not see that the light had turned red, because he was speaking on his cellphone.” Margalit bat Miriam has since passed away.  

The Federal government has begun the slow process of determining whether or not there ought to be national laws regarding cellphone use while driving. All of us who are committed to living according to Halacha need not wait for a government decision. The verdict is already in.

The halachik analysis of this issue proceeds in a very linear fashion, beginning in the classical discussion concerning unintentional murder. The Torah, as we read just recently, commands that we create cities of refuge for people who have unintentionally taken the life of another person. By fleeing to the city of refuge, the one who unintentionally took the life is protected from the impassioned wrath of the “blood-avenger” (the kinsman of the victim). In addition to being protected, he also will be paying for his act, as he will remain confined to the city of refuge until the High Priest dies.

 In its analysis of this passage from the Torah, the Talmud makes it clear that not all unintentional murder is the same. (For a quick summary of the Talmud’s discussion, see Maimonides’ code, Laws of the Murderer, Chapter 6). Sometimes the death of the victim is truly the result of a freak accident. In this case, the person who caused the accident does not flee to the city of refuge. In the eyes of the law, he is completely innocent. On the other end of the spectrum, there is the instance in which again, there was no intention to kill anyone, but the person who caused the death of the other acted with such carelessness and recklessness, that his actions are classified as “approaching the intentional”. This person as well does not flee to a city of refuge. To quote Maimonides (paragraph 4):

            There is also the case of one who kills unintentionally, but his act approaches the intentional, as it involves an act of negligence, or is in an instance in which he should have been cautious but was not. He does not flee to the city of refuge for his sin is too great to be atoned for through his exile… Therefore if the blood avenger finds and kills him, he (the blood avenger) is exempt form punishment.

             Putting aside for a moment any uncomfortable feelings we may have about the law of the blood avenger, the larger point concerning the perpetrator’s act is clear. To cause the death of another through an act of gross negligence – albeit unintentionally and without any premeditation – is categorized as a “great sin”, one which legally approaches intentional murder.

           What do we know about the likelihood of a driver causing a car accident when he or she is speaking on a cellphone (not to mention texting)?  As reported in the NY Times on July 19, the likelihood that a driver holding and talking on a cellphone will crash, is equal to that of a driver whose blood alcohol level is .08 percent – the legal definition of driving while intoxicated. As the Times article put it, “drivers using phone are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers”. The article goes on to quote a Harvard study estimating that cellphone distraction causes thousand of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of injuries per year. The potential for committing a “great sin” is astonishingly high.  And the research is not showing that using a hands-free phone significantly reduces this potential either.

 As halachikly observant Jews, we go to great lengths to lower our risk of sinning. We do not climb trees on Shabbat lest we inadvertently violate Shabbat by breaking a branch. Many of us do not eat corn or beans on Pesach; lest we come to eat inadvertently eat chametz. On the first day of Rosh Hashana this year, we will actually set aside the Biblical mitzva of blowing shofar, lest we inadvertently carry the shofar through the public domain, thus violating the Shabbat. It is self-evident that our system demands that we not drive while distracted by our cellphone, lest we, God forbid, God forbid, inadvertently injure or kill someone. It’s that straightforward.

If for no other reason though, do it for Margalit bat Miriam.   

At the request of the International Rabbinic Fellowship (IRF), we are happy to disseminate the following IRF statement concerning the current struggle over who may perform weddings in Israel.  For the last month, Israel’s ministry for Religious Services, controlled by the Shas party, has been attempting to prohibit the rabbis of Tzohar, a Modern Orthodox, National-Religious group from performing weddings.   Tzohar, whose rabbis have performed over 15,000 weddings in Israel over the past sixteen years,  had created its Wedding Project in 1996 in response to the very negative experiences that secular Israelis had been having with rabbis who work for the Chief Rabbinate. Insensitive and discourteous treatment by these rabbis had been leaving a very sour taste toward religion in the mouths of many couples, and many others were simply opting to marry in Cyprus, without a religious ceremony at all. By contrast, in Tzohar’s description of their Wedding Project ,  “Tzohar’s rabbis do their best to turn the wedding  encounter into a spiritual experience; one which enriches both the couple and the rabbi, which leaves a positive impression with the young couple, and which creates the possibility of further meetings between the couple and rabbi further on in life. The success of the Wedding Project lies in a set of guidelines within which the organization’s rabbis function:
1. The rabbi meets with the couple before the wedding for a conversation aimed at explaining and designing the wedding ceremony.
2. The rabbi arrives punctually at the place of the ceremony.
3. Tzohar’s rabbis do not perform more than one ceremony on any given evening.
4. Tzohar’s rabbis receive no payment for officiating at a wedding.

It is shameful that the Ministry of Religious Services has been trying to shut Tzohar down.
(You can learn more about Tzohar at tzohar.org and about the IRF at http://internationalrabbinicfellowship.org/ )

IRF STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF TZOHAR
The International Rabbinical Fellowship calls upon the Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel to permit the rabbis of the Tzohar rabbinical organization to continue registering marriages and conducting weddings in the State of Israel as has been the practice for the last decade.
The wedding initiative under the auspices of Tzohar has allowed thousands of Israeli couples, who might have opted for non-halakhic avenues, to marry under the wedding canopy according to the laws of Moses and Israel. Furthermore, it has brought many more to greater love for Torah and the commandments and respect and appreciation for tradition in the spirit of “Her Ways are ways of Gentleness and all he paths are peaceful”. The important work of Tzohar is a Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name, which should be strengthened and supported.
Tzohar’s wedding project has also been a tremendous resource for many couples from here in the United States and other areas of the Golah looking to celebrate their weddings in the Jewish state.  Many of these couples would not have had the opportunity to create as joyous and meaningful a wedding were it not for the work of Tzohar.
We call upon the political and rabbinic establishment in Israel to ease this process and not put up more roadblocks that cause dissention and create difficulties for those who would avail themselves of this avenue of Huppah and Kiddushin.   We include in this ensuring the right of every Israeli citizen to register for weddings in the municipality of their choosing regardless of residency.

The morning after the deflating failure of the Super Committee, a lot of us woke up asking where all the adults are. (The ones who don’t let their debt-ridden family slide off a cliff.) It must of course be that there are still some lurking somewhere in the halls of Congress, and with hope and faith, we humbly offer them the strength and inspiration offered on page 6b of Tractate Sanhedrin. 

On that page, the moral propriety of compromise is hotly debated. Rabbi Eliezer the son of Rabbi Yose the Galilean maintains that it is forbidden to broker a compromise. “He who brokers compromise thus offends, for it is written…. ‘For judgment is God’s’. And so Moses’s motto was: Let the law cut through the mountain.”  According to Rabbi Eliezer, unbending commitments to truth and principle  are essential to a person’s integrity and fidelity to God. 

 But the Talmudic discussion doesn’t end with Rabbi Eliezer and Moses. “Aaron, however, loved peace and pursued peace and made peace between man and man.”  From Aaron’s example Rabbi Joshua son of Korha derived that, “brokering a compromise is a meritorious act, for it is written, ‘Execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates’.   What is that kind of justice which coexists with peace?  This is compromise.”

“The halacha”, the Talmud concludes, “is in agreement with Rabbi Joshua son of Korha”. 

It’s not that truth and principle aren’t valued by the Talmud. Of course they are. And it’s not that ideological commitments aren’t deemed important by the Talmud. They are as well. It’s rather that in this world which God created, a world filled with unique human individuals who will invariably and healthfully disagree profoundly about essential matters, peace and life are simply impossible without humane, righteously motivated compromise. This is not a news flash. Every family knows it.  And our Congress used to know it too.

And while we’re offering Talmudic advice to the not-yet-existent Super-Duper Committee, let’s throw in the familiar words of Hillel.  “If I don’t look out for myself, who will look out for me? But if I am only looking out for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

As has been widely reported, Rabbi Steve Greenberg performed a Jewish wedding ceremony for Yoni Bock and Ron Kaplan last week, a ceremony being referred to in at least one press account as “the first Orthodox gay wedding”.  This description derives from the fact that Rabbi Greenberg’s ordination is from YU, and that he has always identified himself as being Orthodox. I know the latter to be true not second-hand, but through the friendship that he and I have maintained over many years, dating back to our years at Yeshiva.

This wedding ceremony raises a serious question for the part of the Modern Orthodox community in which I live. The question is not about whether we should recognize the ceremony as being religiously significant. We obviously do not and cannot.  The formal religious partnering of two men or two women is unalterably contrary to both the law and the spirit of the Torah and the Halacha, and an Orthodox gay marriage ceremony is as hopeless a misnomer as an Orthodox intermarriage is. How we assess the religious significance of the ceremony is clear-cut and simple.

 The question that it raises rather, is whether we should continue to publicly speak about Orthodoxy and homosexuality in the nuanced way that we have been speaking about it over the past several years. I hope that you are by now familiar with the “Statement of Principles” http://statementofprinciplesnya.blogspot.com/ in which many Modern Orthodox rabbis and teachers affirmed the importance of being inclusive of, and sensitive to the challenges of gays and lesbians within the Orthodox community, even as we recognize that Halacha views same-sex sexual interactions as prohibited.  This is indeed a highly-nuanced position. So much so, that our shul hosted a major event last summer whose purpose was to explore what exactly this all means in real life. (And we were pleased to have Rabbi Greenberg participate in that discussion.) But when I read about the wedding, I wondered to myself whether our nuanced approach had unwittingly contributed to the erosion of the halachik standard, whether we had created the impression that the values of sensitivity and inclusion must ultimately trump the law. I asked myself whether with regard to this issue, nuanced discussion simply couldn’t be heard.   

 As I thought the question through, I came to the conclusion that despite these legitimate questions, our nuanced public discussion must go on. The essential premise of the discussion, that the religious prohibition on homosexual sex must not be turned into a justification for demeaning, embarrassing or harassing gays and lesbians, is still as true as ever. The central idea that gays and lesbians who desire to daven and perform mitzvot should be welcomed into the community of davening and mitzvot, still makes sound religious sense. I do think that last week’s wedding compels us to think more – and to talk more explicitly – about the point at which inclusion begins to send a misleading message. And I do think that we must take even greater care now to not be naïve in our deliberations. But I also believe that any decision to abandon our nuanced discussion would be a decision to abandon many cherished members of our community. It is our responsibility to them to carefully forge ahead.

“Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?”

By humbly but firmly addressing this remarkable question to God, our father Avraham installed justice as a primary Jewish value. Everything, even the Divine intention, needs to be measured by the yardstick of justice. One can see the influence of Avraham’s position manifest in a variety of decisions later rendered by the Sages. The Torah rules, for example, that the “rebellious son” is to be judged, and ultimately executed, based upon his projected future malfeasance (“nidon al shem sofo”). One imagines that the Sages’ conclusions that this law was intended for academic but not practical purposes, was motivated by the fact that by normative legal standards, it is unjust to punish someone for sins he has not yet committed. (In the Midrash, God Himself explains His decision to save the young Ishmael from dying of thirst, in exactly this way.) Similarly, the Sages’ insistence that all of the Biblical  “eye for an eye” legislation must be read non-literally, explicitly derives from the inherent injustice of the literal application (Who’s to say that the victim’s eye and the perpetrators eye are of equal value?)

The primacy of justice as a religious value is in great evidence in the writings of the prophets of course, chief among them Isaiah, who declares the sacrificial rituals in the Temple to be of no value (or worse) as long as the widow and the orphan cannot find justice in that society. “Zion will be redeemed through justice”, Isaiah declares. Justice is a primary value, and its absence calls the value of our other forms of religious devotion in sharp question.

It has struck me recently though that while, as an Orthodox community, we are able to speak with clarity and passion about Torah and Mitzvot, about Hesed (kindness), and Tzniut (modesty / humility), we just don’t talk a lot about justice. We seem to feel uncomfortable around the term, associating it with center-left politics and with liberal forms of Judaism. Our shuls tend not to have social justice activities, and our schools, even when providing instruction in texts such as Parshat Mishpatim or Bava Metzia, focus entirely on conveying information, rather than on analyzing the material for how they are wrangling with questions of justice.  Perhaps we even fear that there is something dangerous or subversive about raising the issue of justice when we are engaged in the study of God’s law. How would we, for example, discuss with today’s fifth graders, the justice of a master not being liable when he mortally strikes his slave, as long as the slave did not succumb to his injury within the first 24 hours? The Torah’s explanation that “he (the slave) is the master’s property” probably would not suffice all by itself.

Our demotion of justice from being a first-tier value has not come without consequences for us. It has, for example, warped our communal conversation about Shalom Rubashkin, as at the same time that we decry the injustice of his sentencing, we have still not developed the language with which to describe the injustices he visited upon the workers in his factory. It hampers our ability to fully confront the phenomenon of agunot, as our conversation is often limited only to the halachik details of the laws of divorce or to the fruitless game of he said / she said, because  the plain and open cry of “injustice!” doesn’t seem to have sufficient currency to sway Orthodox public opinion. (Calling out the injustice cannot alone solve the problem of course, but it would go a long way toward shaming people into compliance.)

On the occasions that we have in fact assigned justice its proper place, we have achieved important things. The prevalence in Modern Orthodox circles of daughters reciting kaddish for parents, and of daughters marking their Bat Mitzvah in their shuls – each being practices which were met with considerable objection at first –  is the result of the  simple triumph of justice. Justice, one of our basic religious values.

 Let’s learn again how to use this powerful word. Let’s take the example of our father Avraham. And let us bring closer the day when Zion will be redeemed through justice.

 A few months ago, I was sitting in the car with my 18 year old son, as Kim Kardashian’s name was mentioned on the radio. “Who is that guy?” I asked (though for the life of me I can’t explain what male name I though Kim was a diminutive of.) After one very long incredulous teenage stare, I at least learned that she’s not a guy.

 Over the last few days I couldn’t miss the news that Kim got married and the filed for divorce in the space of 72 days. I realize that it may all be part of her reality show, and that maybe I shouldn’t be taking the whole thing too seriously. But for the sake of an institution that a lot of us believe in deeply – the institution of marriage – I believe it’s worth speaking up.

 Whenever I work with couples as they plan their marriages, we talk about the rewards of marriage, but even more so about the covenant of marriage. Because it is a covenant. That’s what it is. To marry is to undertake the most sublime set of commitments that we will ever pledge to another human being. And people not prepared to do this, truly have no moral business getting married.

 Dr. Erich Fromm said it best in his classic book “The Art of Loving”, whose central thesis is that nobody can  passively “be in love” for very long. If we plan to love someone long-term, we have to be committed to engaging continuously in the activity of “loving” that person. For Fromm, this involves scared commitments to continuously  demonstrating “care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.”  His elaboration on the element of “knowledge” is especially striking. “To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if there were not guided by knowledge…. The knowledge which is an aspect of love, is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself, and see the other person in his own terms. I may know, for instance, that a person is angry… but when I know him more deeply I know that he is anxious and worried, that he feels lonely…”

 Not surprisingly our own literature sounds many similar themes. In his “Lonely Man of Faith”, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes that the point of the Adam and Eve story is that a person who wants to overcome loneliness can do so only through a gesture of sacrifice. Adam literally gives part of himself to another, and as a result is able to establish with Eve, “a new kind of fellowship [where] not only hands are joined, but experiences as well, [where] one hears the rhythmic beat of hearts starved for existential companionship and all-embracing sympathy…” This is the marriage. Profound both in its transformative power and in the mutual commitment it demands. And it is ridiculed by a marriage that lasts 72 days.

 Even the sexual dimension of marriage is about the covenant. Commenting on the verse “and he shall cleave to is wife and they shall become one flesh,” the Netziv of Volozhin wrote, “ it is only the active effort of cleaving between husband and wife (i.e. sexual intimacy) that brings them closer together such that they become one”.  Marital sexuality is purposeful. It requires kavannah, in the same way that prayer does.  For it preserves and deepens the covenant.

 Whenever someone publicly mocks and diminishes the institution of marriage, the great majority of us who understand that marriage is our most scared covenant must respond. By calling out the offenders for what they’ve done, by insuring that our children understand what marriage really is, and by re-affirming our personal commitments to our covenanted partner.

The Torah is timeless; its laws binding for every generation. The Sages are the masters of the Oral Law; we accept their legal authority.

Does it follow then that we may never reassess rabbinic practices, even when circumstances change? Or, is it the case that such reassessments have frequently historically occurred? If they have, on what grounds have they occurred?  Where are the lines to be drawn?  And would not these reassessments constitute an affront to our Sages’ wisdom? These questions came to the fore in response to my post last week concerning the blessing “shelo asani isha”, and to my assertion that we should be using a halachik strategy to omit it from our daily blessings. And these questions richly deserve thoughtful response.

In broad terms, the Torah immovably and eternally anchors our values and our deeds, and it is our Sages who teach us what the Torah means. Thus, for example , Shabbat and its 39 categories of “work”, the laws of forbidden sexual relationships and who and what are included in them, and the mitzvah to preserve life as well as the extent we must go to do so, are our fixed stars.

But another legal function that our Sages perform is to apply (as opposed to interpret) the Torah’s eternal values and commands to the circumstances of real life. And the halachik record shows that when the circumstances of real life dramatically change, the Sages’ original application of the law can change along with them. This is particularly true when the original application is now seen as potentially harmful in light of the current, changed circumstances. Why is this process not considered an affront to the wisdom of the Sages? Why is it not deemed as an undermining of the Sages’ authority?  The answer is, that while we revere our Sages for their wisdom, we have never ascribed to them the gift of prophecy.  We have never expected that they would possess the capacity to anticipate realities that would unfold centuries or even millennia after they lived. And they never expected this of themselves.
A few examples to illustrate the point:

The Talmudic Sages applied the Torah’s command that we distance ourselves from idolatry to the circumstances of their marketplace, thus generating prohibitions on engaging non-Jews in commercial transactions that might in some way contribute to the latter’s religious practices. But centuries later the Jews of early medieval Ashkenaz were facing changed circumstances in which their ability to make a living depended entirely on conducting business with their Christian neighbors, including in ways and at times that the Talmud had forbidden. A number of reasons for leniency were offered by the great rabbinic voices of the day. One of those voices belonged to Rabbenu Yitzchak who cited the radically changed circumstances of Ashkenaz. “[These rabbinic practices were applicable] only in their days, when many Jews lived together [in a self-sustaining community]. We are today found among the nations, and we would have no way of earning money if we did not transact with them” (Tosafot, Bava Metzia 70b, and Avoda Zara, 15a). The circumstances of the marketplace had dramatically changed. Rabbenu Yitzchak intended no offense to the Sages of old.

The Talmud ruled that a twice-widowed woman must not be allowed to re-marry, for it had reason to believe that she posed a life-threatening danger to any would-be third husband. This was an application of the Biblical mitzvah to safeguard life. By Rambam’s time however, rabbis no longer believed that any such danger existed. As a result, the Sages’ law no longer had the effect of safeguarding a man’s life, rather only reducing a widow’s life to lonely misery. Thus, Rambam and others supported a practice in which “we counsel the widow that if someone were to betroth her, we (the Bet Din) would not compel them to divorce”, and when and if such a betrothal actually occurs, “the Beit Din writes her a ketuba, since she has already been betrothed.”  (Cited in Kesef Mishnah to Laws of Forbidden relations, 21:31) The application of the law had to change according to the changed circumstances. 

Rabbi David Tzvi Hoffman, writing in Germany in the 19th century, acknowledged that the rabbinic tradition up to his day was to exclude public Shabbat-violators from counting toward a minyan. The logic was that those who removed themselves from the normative community should not be recognized. But observing the radically changed circumstances of his place and time, in which Jews who observed Shabbat were thought to be odd, and the non-observers were thought to be “normal”, he concluded that the the original logic didn’t apply any longer, and that the original practice shoudl therefore be changed.  (Melamed L’ho’il #29)  He was simply living in a circumstance that his predecessors couldn’t have imagined.

Many more examples could be cited (for example Hillel and Pruzbal, the normative halachik practice to violate Shabbat in order to save fetuses in the eight month of gestation). And the argument is strong for taking the same approach to the way that the Talmudic Sages’ applied the Biblical mitzvah to praise God. There was a time when to praise God for not being a woman was neither insensitive nor an obstacle in the way of crucial religious progress. But our circumstances are different.

None of the rabbis who reassessed earlier practices intended to offend, and one can be certain that no offense would have been taken. Reassessing rabbinic practice in light of radically changed circumstances is a healthy and necessary part of the halachik process.

What the precise mechanisms are for this reassessment, and how exactly the process is to unfold, are very important questions without crisp answers. But the general guideline is provided by the amora Raba, who told his students that after he dies they “should not tear up his rulings [even if they seem problematic], for if I were alive, I might be able to explain my reasons. But neither should you simply accept them, for a judge should be guided only by what his eyes see” (Bava Batra 131a)