Dec 20 2023 12 mins
At the Freehof Institute, we understand halakhah in its best sense not as a set of fixed rules but as a discourse, a language of thought and of argument that Jews utilize to study their sacred sources and determine just what they tell us when it comes to matters of sacred action. And we believe that language to be a flexible one, a process that can yield guidance fully coherent with our own liberal and progressive religious outlook. We certainly don’t believe that Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi (d. 1998), the S’fardic chief rabbi of Tel Aviv-Yafo, qualifies as a liberal or a progressive. But when it comes to the “flexibility of the halakhah,” a phrase that he invented, well, we like to think that he and we are working from the same playbook.
Source sheet available at www.freehofinstitute.org/podcast.